Book Report: God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens

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Christopher Hitchens is an odd duck, from my perspective. He is an incredibly articulate, deeply intellectual writer (and frequent talk show/cable news guest), who will often send you sheepishly to a dictionary with his vocabulary. He's also British, which to we colonists, automatically makes him seem smarter.

I am an agnostic, so Hitchens' religious views always resonate with me. He's an atheist, which to me is really sort of a more dedicated and resolute version of the way I think about religion. Oddly though, Hitchens is also a right-wing conservative, and is deeply supportive of the Iraq War/Occupation. Though he has become (much like Andrew Sullivan) more critical of George W. Bush, the Bush Administration and the GOP, he's still maddeningly betrothed to his political ideology. His faith in the rightness of the Iraq invasion is strangely akin to religion.

Fortunately, he mostly avoids political matters in his book, God is Not Great, except where it pertains to religion. This book kept my interest from cover to cover. Even though the subject matter is so dense as to be opaque, Hitchens has managed to clear it up for us. He describes each of the major religions, their history, their origins, and where they have cribbed from each other. Even his advanced vocabulary is breezy and has that British feel to it.

I may not have a belief in religion, but I'm endlessly fascinated by it, and this book provided quite an education without trying to indoctrinate me--quite the opposite actually. Deeply religious people would likely not get very far into this book. But they probably ought to, and not for the reasons you might think. I believe that Hitchens' book could be a useful tool for the religious to better understand the irreligious.

A common misconception about unbelievers is that we know "the truth" of religion, but reject it out of defiance or belligerence. It's not true. We don't see it as "the truth" in the first place. Hitchens lays out why, and in an entertaining fashion.

Highly Recommended